Interesting books, and news items about books and periodicals, particularly with respect to political and social issues. (Note: In some versions of IE, the profile may appear at the bottom of the page with this template; I will look into it; Mozilla works fine.) Note: no one pays me for these reviews; they are not "endorsements"!

Saturday, March 30, 2013

Eben Alexander: "Proof of Heaven": The afterlife, when the brain cortex completely stops

No, don’t get me wrong.
I may be approaching my seventieth (at least not “eleventieth”)
birthday, but I didn’t read this book out of a belief that Im going to die
myself soon. No, the topic of the
afterlife has always been interesting, and recent articles on cosmology have
the persistence of consciousness seem inevitable and needing exploration. I will soon read Mary Neal’s comparable
account and compare it.

Eben Alexander is a neurosurgeon himself. His story is unique. He had moved to Lynchburg, VA with his
family, and developed a sudden case of bacterial meningitis early on a Monday
morning in November 2010 at home.

Bacterial meningitis sometimes spreads in college dorm
(which is why vaccinations are often required), and sometimes results in
amputations because of the unusual way the bacterial toxins destroy blood
vessels. But in Eben’s case, the
bacteria, non-responsive to antibiotics, caused his cortex to stop functioning
completely. Miraculously, he
recovered. He also recovered his
memories and function, very much the way a computer slowly brings up its
services when it has been turned off a long time.

It is very unusual for meningitis to appear in a middle-aged
adult, and normally bacteria cannot get to the brain from other parts of the
body. His strain did not match one found
in Israel, where he had just visited.
Conceivably, the strain could cause a pandemic if contagious, but no one
else in his family got it. There is no
explanation of the disease.

Part of his life story concerns his own adoption, and effort
to meet birth parents and biological siblings.

During his coma, he had a Near-Death Experience. The experience started in a kind of permanent
darkness and void that he calls the Core.
He was drawn into a world of dazzling beauty, similar to other
descriptions of a kind of garden heaven.
There was also a Gateway to the cosmos.
He says he saw people and angels. He believes he met his biological
sister there. It seems as though some of
the people were “reflections” of people still alive on earth, and others had
past. There were people of varying ages,
including children.

An NDE during a coma from meningitis, he argues, may
constitute more “proof” of the afterlife because the cerebral cortex, compared
to deeper parts of the brain, is so completely shut down that normal
physiological explanations of NDE’s could not possibly apply.

My own take on this
goes something like this: The universe
is built in little blocks down to subatomic particles. There is a hierarchy of matter, from
physical, to chemical to biological.
Consciousness and free will become a way to counter entropy. Normally, biological systems must reproduce
in order to counter entropy (although how “angels” get around this is an
interesting question for thermodynamics).
Also free will, and the possibility of wrongdoing which comes with the
territory, is essential to countering natural entropy. It would seem as though consciousness is as
much a part of physics as more familiar concepts of matter and energy. All of this seems to come together at the
quantum level, where there is so much uncertainty.

It would seem to me that consciousness cannot be
destroyed. It would make sense that
after physical death, you remain aware of yourself and everyone who has passed
is aware of you; all of you are aware of the deepest motives of others. It is the ultimate connectivity, the ultimate
astral social network. But you can only deal with your issues by living again,
starting over on another planet, maybe in a different universe. Perhaps your consciousness travels to some repository
through a black hole.

Eben says that when you’re alive on this Earth, your brain
doesn’t “remember” your trans-cosmic consciousness. It has enough to do just to adapt to a real
planet. But when the cortex is shut down
completely, the universal consciousness can take over.

What Eben seems to have seen is more a template for a place
than a real “planet” with a geography, although some of the people (his sister)
seem specific. Even discusses time as a
mutable dimension, and suggests that experience of the afterlife could involve
other universes built among other dimensions (up to eleven in string
theory). If time is mutable, you could
imagine at a person’s timeline could be available at all possible ages in the
afterlife, just as it is in memory. When
I stand in a disco, I may envy the body of a 25-year-old and wish I could have
it back. But in a sense, in the
afterlife, maybe I could.

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Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!

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